(though of course those kids could be still kicking now at eighty, and reading this... as could we be...)

(very familiar scenes for me by the way, my dad was for a while in the late 1940s a traveling salesman of cardboard boxes, Iowa a major part of his territory, I went along on a few of his trips... and saw a lot... of tall corn)

I loved to play marbles!! We called them "bolitas". But I could only do it when we go to the "quinta" my mother's family had near the city of La Platahttp://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=389161&l=acb7639a68&id=100000225052163wonderful pics, Tom

"Advocates for the homeless have protested the recent decision of the administration of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to experiment on the city’s poor by conducting what is essentially a randomized trial on the effect of denying emergency housing assistance to those in danger of homelessness.

The New York experiment involves the city’s Homebase program, a very modest effort involving the annual expenditure of $23 million for job training, counseling and emergency funds that has been given to several thousand families each year since it began in 2004, with the aim of helping them to stay in their homes.

The Bloomberg administration, comparing its actions to the testing of new drug treatments, denied this emergency help to 200 of the 400 families applying to Homebase between June and August of this year. Those denied help were referred to other agencies.

Homeless advocates pointed to the fact that the city had earlier boasted that the Homebase program was a great success, one that had prevented homelessness in 90 percent of those who received assistance.

The real aim of the study was made clear in a statement by Seth Diamond, the commissioner of the city’s Homeless Services Department, quoted in the New York Times. By Diamond’s logic, the 90 percent who benefited by the Homebase program might be resourceful enough to have succeeded without it. Diamond acknowledged that his agency had to cut $20 million from its current budget, and that federal money for the program was expiring in 2012.

In other words, the city’s “experiment” is designed to justify and rationalize cuts in the meager housing assistance program that was established when Wall Street was booming and that can no longer be tolerated by the wealthy elite that runs New York. As most New Yorkers are well aware, the $23 million cost of the Homebase program is equivalent to perhaps one-tenth of one percent of the billions that will be handed out in Wall Street bonuses at the end of this year."

I have been sort of re-telling myself the story in this picture novel you've composed for a day now. Each of the Vachon photos really impresses itself on you. The kids with the marbles and the little girl are so charming and I wish I had the two pillar photos on my wall. (In fact I went to the Library of Congress website to see whether they were available for purchase, but apparently they're not, which is a pity. They should expand their selection and help stimulate the economy.) I'm not finished with All The Marbles yet.